Rackspace launches cloud revamp in Australia

Rackspace has announced the Australian launch of its redesigned public cloud offering, along with an update of its Australian cloud servers that it says will provide a 'cloud-bursting' offering for local customers.

US hybrid cloud provider, Rackspace, has announced it will launch its revamped public cloud service in Australia later this month, with its updated Australian servers set to offer local customers a 'cloud-bursting' service, according to the company’s chief technology officer (CTO) for Asia, Alan Perkins.

Perkins, who spoke at the CeBIT business technology conference in Sydney this week, said that the new service and local infrastructure would enable Australian customers to change the way they use their cloud services, with a greater ability to burst into the public cloud from a dedicated private cloud environment during times of peak demand.

"We offer a hybrid cloud product with dedicated hosting that will allow customers to burst out into a public cloud model," Perkins told ZDNet. "This will change the dynamic of when you use a dedicated space, when you use public cloud and when you burst from one to the other.

"You can have a dedicated baseline but then you burst into a public cloud facility to accommodate any spikes in demand. You own the base, but rent the spike. As your spike becomes more commonplace with your usage, you can move into a dedicated environment and burst again into the cloud," he said.

According to Perkins, the Australian release of the new service comes about six months after its release in the United Kingdom and North America, because the company's local data centres needed to be "beefed up" to accommodate a greater volume of data.

The redesigned cloud offering will be launched in Australia on 13 May and, according to Rackspace, will create a new hosting platform for a variety of workloads ranging from web hosting and eCommerce applications to larger scale NoSQL data stores like MongoDB and Cassandra.

The first Australian company to trial Rackspace’s revamped local cloud servers is job management software vendor, SimPRO, which has been utilising Rackspace’s new cloud offering to increase application response and scalability.

"Our operations are expanding significantly with offices currently in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US," said SimPRO's CTO, Jonathan Eastgate. "We previously managed a co-location environment but our growth and demand required a much faster cloud solution that met our needs for performance, reliability and customer support.

"Using a combination of Rackspace servers with the incredibly fast network, we were able to quickly deploy highly scalable database and web clusters which we were previously unable with bare metal configurations," he said.

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